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Tuesday, February 10, 1998 By Tony Norman
I grew up in a home where Eldridge Cleaver "Soul On Ice " was on the same shelf as the books I got from the Jack & Jill Club every month.
I don't mean to suggest this was some literary ideal, but it does put into perspective my bemusement regarding the never-ending debate about "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and whether Mark Twain's satiric novel should ever make its way into the hands of young people who might find the frequency of the "n-word" too traumatic to ever get over in this lifetime.
Though I disagree, I understand where the State Conference of the NAACP is coming from in a statement released last week, the nation's oldest civil rights organization strongly encouraged Pennsylvania schools to refrain from making "Huck Finn" a requirement because of what it deems "racially offensive" material in its pages.
The NAACP believes that exposing young, and presumably unprepared, African-American minds to the content of Twain's greatest and most problematic work will inevitably lead to what local scholar Jonathan Arc calls "bad classroom experiences."
The NAACP insists that black students, already badgered in hypersensitivity because of the pressures of living in a white-dominated society, will be further mortified by the racially derogatory words in Twain's text, especially if encountered in the presence of white classmates and teachers.
But it's been my contention that if taught correctly, all American history and letters is "racially offensive," and as such, should be required reading for all citizens.
To single out this text for exclusion because of the presence of the word nigger is to engage in the most patronizing of racial politics:
Underestimating the intelligence, resilience and memory of black people.
There's nothing more debilitating to black achievement than worrying about "what white folks are going to think." Sweating what goes through the minds of white kids when they hear the word "nigger" in a classroom setting strikes me as somewhat neurotic.
Besides, racial epithets in the context of our best literature undermine white America's belief in its own racial innocence along with its highly mythologized sense of fair play. Black students would be crazy to duck any dialogue about race out of an exaggerated sense of embarrassment over one word.
And what are we to make of this rush to always cover the eyes and ears of black students, anyway? For once, I'd like to see a civil rights organization say "bring it on, our kids can handle anything."
Last week I called the junior high teacher I'd always given credit to for introducing me to "Huck Finn" only to find she'd never taught the book Apparently, I'd picked it up on my own after reading "Tom Sawyer" in the sixth grade.
Well, regardless of when I first read it, I'm sure I wasn't aware of all the issues the book raises; still, a naive reading didn't kill me. If anything, it probably made me a little more uppity. Even then I knew that as long as my mom owned a book called "Die, Nigger, Die," she wasn't going to say squat about me encountering the "n-word" on my own.
And how, exactly, will black students shielded from "Huck Finn" make any sense of the work of black writers like Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison without referring to the American novel these writers respected beyond all others?
In an essay written long ago and far away, Ellison said of "Huck Finn":
"being committed to optimism, serious novels have always been troublesome to Americans precisely because of their involvement with our problems of identity. If they depict too much of reality they frighten us by giving us a picture of society frozen at a point so far from our optimistic ideal .... that we feel compelled to deny it. Yet if they leave out too much, we cannot take them seriously for very long, even though we might buy them in hundreds of thousands of copies."
When I started reading Dostoevsky in high school on my own, I was no longer a West Philadelphian, but a citizen of a vastly mysterious and deeply troubled world made accessible for the first time by edgy, truthful literature.
The net effect of discouraging black (and white) students from reading one of the three most important works of American literature is to imply that their minds are too passive to handle the good stuff.
If an adult had come along 20 years ago and told me that I couldn't handle a book written a century before because of the presence of a word I've heard in far ruder contexts since practically my first day on Earth, I would've kicked his, excuse me, gluteus maximus.
What's at stake is this debate is black kids right to use as many tools as possible to get off the plantation. "Huck Finn" is one of those tools.
Tony Norman's email is: tnorman@post-gazette.com
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